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HIV was not engineered by unethical scientists. But "The HIV Matrix" was.
The Last Lovers on Earth
The brave little indie film about two people who escaped the tyranny of "The HIV Matrix."
The hilarious, eye-opening movie the American AIDS establishment forbids you to see.
Is the wall between AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a racial wall? Is it a wall of medical apartheid? Why don't we hear about a massive "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)" epidemic in Africa? Are heterosexual people of color told that they have AIDS when they essentially have the same kind of variable immune dysfunction as white heterosexuals who have "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?" Does that explain why there is no major white heterosexual "AIDS" epidemic in America like there is in Africa--because it is hidden behind a euphemistic, racist wall? Does lying to the African American community about the link between AIDS and CFS constitute a new Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, one that could be called "The Atlanta AIDS/CFS Experiment"? Have people of color been deprived of the scientific truth about AIDS/CFS and therefore harmed politically and medically? Has the false dichotomy of these two syndromes resulted in unfair, unnecessary and often tragic and catastrophic medical experimentation on people of color? And what about the attempt to suppress any questioning or skepticism in the black community toward the AIDS medical elites--what are we to make of that?
Has the militant, often angry scientific focus on HIV testing and research been a political red herring to keep attention away from the virus that people with AIDS and CFS have in common, namely HHV-6? Is the withholding of the truth about the link between AIDS and CFS been akin to the withholding of syphilis treatment from the sharecroppers in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment?
The material and links below should help you better understand the racial politics of AIDS and the parallels between the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and what could be called "The Atlanta AIDS/CFS Experiment."
Another consequence of having millions of Africans threatened by AIDS may be to make it politically acceptable to use the continent as a laboratory for vaccine trials and the distribution of toxic, anti-HIV drugs like AZT. Vaccine experiments in the United States have been curtailed due to government regulations and fear of lawsuits from research-related injuries. However, according to a 1994 Rockefeller Foundation report, "Accelerating Preventive HIV Vaccines for the World," risky HIV vaccine trials would be tolerated--even welcomed--in African countries.--Charles Geschekter, Myths of AIDS ans Sex, New African October 1994
. . .sexual transmission can't explain the differences in rates of HIV positivity between African (about five per 100) and American (about one per 7,000) heterosexuals.--Charles Geshekter, Reappraising AIDS in Africa, Reappraising AIDS Sept./Oct. 1997
The serious consequences of claiming that millions of Africans are threatened by AIDS or are already HIV-positive makes it politically acceptable to use the continent as a laboratory for vaccine trials and for the distribution of toxic drugs of disputed effectiveness like ddI and AZT.(36) For instance, AZT is a toxic chemical whose primary biochemical action is the random termination of DNA synthesis; it is monstrous to give such a carcinogenic drug to pregnant women because fetuses cannot develop into babies without DNA synthesis. The catastrophic effects that result from ingesting AZT merit a special place in the medical hall of shame. -- Charles Gesheckter A Critical Reappraisal of African AIDS Research and Western Sexual Stereotypes
An ongoing investigation by the Vera Institute of Justice, has uncovered 59 additional New York City foster care children--between July and September--who may have been used in AIDS drug / vaccine trials in violation of federal regulations. This brings the tentative total number of mostly minority children involved, to 773. --Alliance for Human Research Protection
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1] also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Pelkola Syphilis Study, Public Health Service Syphilis Study or the Tuskegee Experiments was a clinical study, conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which 399 (plus 201 control group without syphilis) poor — and mostly illiterate — African American sharecroppers were denied treatment for Syphilis.
This study became notorious because it was conducted without due care to its subjects, and led to major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had "bad blood" and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating. --Wikipedia
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), one of the country's major civil rights organizations, has been providing AIDS awareness education through a program called RACE (Reducing AIDS through Community Education). In 1990, the SCLC conducted a survey among 1056 African American Church members in five cities. They found that 34% of the respondents believed that AIDS was an artificial virus, 35% believed that AIDS is a form of genocide, and 44% believed that the government is not telling the truth about AIDS. --Tuskegee University overview of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Although Western scientists accepted the African origin without difficulty, many Africans were unconvinced and argued that the fundamental concepts of the AIDS from Africa hypothesis resided in racial theory and not in science. --Rosalind Harrison-Chirimuuta, AIDS from Africa: Western Science or Racist Mythology?
In 14 years of AIDS journalism, I've never seen the AIDS leadership writhing in the kind of agony they now find themselves in daily. The prospect of having to debate, defend or quantify their paradigm is melting them down.
Since last fall, when the government of South Africa announced that it would suspend AZT use while investigating its toxicity, the country that once symbolized oppression has emerged as a crucible of enlightenment.
Over the past several months, the Western AIDS orthodoxy has been rendered increasingly deranged by South African President Thabo Mbeki's call for a reopening of the HIV-AIDS causation question. Before long they began earnestly calling for the criminal prosecution of AIDS dissidents. (This rabid wish was voiced by way of the mainstream AIDS media.) --Celia Farber AIDS & South Africa: A Contrary Conference in Pretoria, New York Press, May 25, 2000
Most people who have heard about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study subscribe to a myth that the researchers were bad, rogue doctors who secretly carried on the experiment out of pure racist hatred. In fact, the researchers regularly published their work in journals like Public Health Reports and the Journal of Chronic Disease. In other words, the researchers’ colleagues knew what was going on, and indeed approved the papers through peer review. Historical records show only one clinician ever raising an objection, in a private letter in 1965, to the persistent withholding of penicillin from the subjects. (The letter was filed without response, and the study didn’t end until a journalist exposed it to the general public in 1972.) And the researchers were not generally contemptuous of their black male subjects; indeed, one key member of the team was nurse Eunice Rivers, an African-American woman who aided in the deception and obfuscation and believed, against all reason, that she and the study were helping the subjects. The initial funding agency for what became a long-term study came from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a liberal foundation that wanted to see the extension of good medical care to the usually neglected African-American population in the U.S. south. The Tuskegee Institute, a proud, African-American medical institution, participated in the study.
The truth is, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study wasn’t hidden, and it wasn’t carried out by bad, overtly racist people. It just went all wrong – it went on much too long, long after researchers needed to still be doing "basic" research on untreated syphilis. What kept it going? Racism, yes. But also institutional (academic) inertia, continued funding and publication opportunities, the assumption that good doctors and nurses and scholars couldn’t do bad things to patients, and a blind belief in the purity of "basic" research. And what Martha Solomon Watson has called "the rhetoric of dehumanization" within the study’s internals records and its published reports – that is, specialized language that made the researchers sound like passive tools of science, language that made the subjects sound like mere sites of disease, and language that "highlight[ed] a relatively minor difference (skin color) between groups of subjects as it obscure[d] their more numerous and significant resemblances." --Alice Dreger So You're a Scholar Who Wants to Make Things Happen
In this diverse group of HIV infected subjects from throughout Africa we found a significant association between HIV and HHV6 infection. --Scott DA, Constantine NT, Association of human herpes virus 6 (HHV6) and HIV infections in Africa,Int Conf AIDS. 1989 Jun 4-9; 5: 626 (abstract no. Th.C.P.57)
I have come to sincerely believe that these HIV tests do immeasurably more harm than good, due to their astounding lack of specificity and standardization. I can buy the idea that anonymous screening of the blood supply for some nonspecific marker of ill health (which, due to cross reactivity with many known pathogens, a positive HIV antibody test often seems to be) is useful. I cannot buy the idea that any individual needs to have a diagnostic HIV test. A negative test may not be accurate (whatever that means), but a positive one can create utter havoc and destruction in a person’s life – all for a virus that most likely does absolutely nothing. I do not feel it is going too far to say that these tests ought to be banned for diagnostic purposes.
The real victims in this mess are those whose lives are turned upside-down by the stigma of an HIV diagnosis. These people, most of whom are perfectly healthy, are encouraged to avoid intimacy and are further branded with the implication that they were somehow dreadfully foolish and careless. Worse, they are encouraged to take massive daily doses of some of the most toxic drugs ever manufactured. HIV, for many years, has fulfilled the role of a microscopic terrorist. People have lost their jobs, been denied entry into the Armed Forces, been refused residency in and even entry into some countries, even been charged with assault or murder for having consensual sex; babies have been taken from their mothers and had toxic medications forced down their throats. There is no precedent for this type of behavior, as it is all in the name of a completely unproven, fundamentally flawed hypothesis, on the basis of highly suspect, indirect tests for supposed infection with an allegedly deadly virus – a virus that has never been observed to do much of anything. . . . For over twenty years, the general public has been greatly misled and ill-informed. As someone who has been raised by parents who taught me from a young age never to believe anything just because "everyone else accepts it to be true," I can no longer just sit by and do nothing, thereby contributing to this craziness. And the craziness has gone on long enough. As humans – as honest academics and scientists – the only thing we can do is allow the truth to come to light. --Rebecca Culshaw, Ph.D., Why I Quit HIV
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded $35 million in funding to state and local health departments to increase HIV testing opportunities among populations disproportionately affected by HIV, primarily African Americans. Twenty-three states and major metropolitan areas will receive awards ranging from $690,000 to $5.4 million. --CDC Press Release, September 27, 2007
Over the past seven years Dr. Sandra Quinn at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I have traced the roots of the Tuskegee legacy to the AIDS epidemic. Many African Americans believe that AIDS is a form of genocide, and their fear and suspicion of the health care delivery system is directly related to the history of the Tuskegee legacy. --Dr. Stephen Thomas, May 16, 1997, Online News Hour
For many African-Americans, the Tuskegee legacy casts a shadow over biomedical research, medicine, and public health practice. It is used as a reason not to take advantage of early treatment for preventable diseases, not to participate in clinical research. The underrepresentation of blacks as blood donors, their reluctance to sign organ donor cards, their fear of being tested for AIDS, and their hesitancy to have their children immunized threatens the health and well-being of us all. Trust, once given unconditionally, now must be earned. How can black people trust what their doctors tell them, what public health agencies tell them, when they know the men in the Tuskegee Study had syphilis and were not treated? --Dr. Stephen Thomas, The Legacy of Tuskegee, The Body, January/February, 2000
The huge, alleged AIDS epidemic in Africa is based on several factors which have no scientific basis: 1) WHO's faulty estimates, 2) the nonspecific clinical case definition of AIDS, and 3) grossly inaccurate HIV antibody tests which are not applicable in Africa. While AIDS authorities proclaim that 25.3 million Africans are doomed to die, in reality, no one knows if a single one of them is infected with HIV. --Christine Johnson, Why the "AIDS test" Doesn't work in Africa, Rethinking AIDS, January 2001
Thanks to stringent FDA regulations born of the thalidomide debacle, testing a vaccine, or any new medicine, in the United States takes an average of seven years. Beyond that the pool of HIV-negative men and women at risk for AIDS, the group in whom any candidate vaccine would have to be tested, is no large enough to permit many such trials.
In Africa, the number of prospective test subjects was infinitely larger, and there were no bothersome regulatory agencies to worry about. --John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo
I think where most AIDS dissidents continue to miss the mark is that they are so busy saying HIV is not the cause of AIDS that they fail to see that there is a blazing heterosexual CFS epidemic sweeping across the developed world. In 3rd world countries, where HIV diagnostic tests do not exist (and/or are too expensive to conduct) CFS patients are labeled AIDS patients by sheer symptomatology alone. It is only in first and second world countries, where we over-complicate everything with questionably defective diagnostic tests and shoddy intellectual definitional platforms, where achieving the elite status of an AIDS diagnosis must be coupled with . . . an HIV+ diagnostic test result. That's right people...if I lived in Africa right now I would have an AIDS diagnosis in hand. Rather, because of geography, capitalism, and politics, I am both a CFS and an HIV-Negative AIDS patient instead. Straight Talk About CFS & Non-HIV AIDS
Joyce Ann Hafford, a Victim of an AIDS Experiment Gone Wrong
Joyce Ann Hafford was thirty-three years old and had always been healthy. She showed no signs of any of the clinical markers associated with AIDS — her CD4 counts, which measure the lymphocytes that are used to indicate how strong a person's immune system is, and which HIV is believed to slowly corrode, were in the normal range, and she felt fine. In early June 2003, she was enrolled in the trial [of Nevirapine, an experimental AIDS drug] and on June 18 took her first doses of the drugs. "She felt very sick right away," recalls her older sister, Rubbie King. "Within seventy-two hours, she had a very bad rash, welts all over her face, hands, and arms. That was the first sign that there was a problem. I told her to call her doctor and she did, but they just told her to put hydrocortisone cream on it. I later learned that a rash is a very had sign, but they didn't seem alarmed at all."
Hafford was on the drug regimen for thirty-eight days. "Her health started to deteriorate from the moment she went on the drugs," says King. "She was always in pain, constantly throwing up, and finally she got to the point where all she could do was lie down." The sisters kept the news of Hafford's HIV test and of the trial itself from their mother, and Hafford herself attributed her sickness and nausea to being pregnant. She was a cheerful person, a noncomplainer, and was convinced that she was lucky to have gotten into this trial. "She said to me,
Nell' —that's what she called me—I have got to get through this. I can't let my baby get this virus.' I said, `Well, I understand that, but you're awful sick.' But she never expressed any fear because she thought this was going to keep her baby from being HIV positive. She didn't even know she was in trouble."On July 16, at her scheduled exam, Hafford's doctor took note of the rash, which was "pruritic and macular-papular," and also noted that she was suffering hyperpigmentation, as well as ongoing nausea, pain, and vomiting. By this time all she could keep down were cans of Ensure. Her blood was drawn for lab tests, but she was not taken off the study drugs, according to legal documents and internal NIH memos.
Eight days later, Hafford went to the Regional Medical Center "fully symptomatic," with what legal documents characterize as including: "yellow eyes, thirst, darkening of her arms, tiredness, and nausea without vomiting." She also had a rapid heartbeat and difficulty breathing. Labs were drawn, and she was sent home, still on the drugs. The next day, July 25, Hafford was summoned back to the hospital after her lab reports from nine days earlier were finally reviewed. She was admitted to the hospital's ICU with "acute and subacute necrosis of the liver, secondary to drug toxicity, acute renal failure, anemia, septicemia, premature separation of the placenta," and threatened "premature labor." She was finally taken off the drugs but was already losing consciousness. Hafford's baby, Sterling, was delivered by C-section on July 29, and she remained conscious long enough not to hold him but at least to see him and learn that she'd had a boy. "We joked about it a little, when she was still coming in and out of consciousness in ICU," Rubbie recalls. "I said to her, `You talked about me so much when you were pregnant that that baby looks just like me."' Hafford's last words were a request to be put on a breathing tube. "She said she thought a breathing tube might help her," says Rubbie. "That was the last conversation I had with my sister." In the early morning hours of August 1, Rubbie and her mother got a call to come to the hospital, because doctors had lost Hafford's pulse. Jermal was sleeping, and Rubbie woke her own daughter and instructed her not to tell Jermal anything yet. They went to the hospital, and had been there about ten minutes when Joyce Ann died.--Celia Farber Out Of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science, Harper's Magazine, March 1, 2006
AZT is a certain killer! Who will be held responsible for the death of patients (some 180,000 now [1989] being treated with AZT) that results from AZT therapy – pharmacological homicide? --Peter Duesberg
There is no doubt that AZT is a highly toxic drug, that it will be harmful to patients, many of whom are already severely debilitated. On th other hand, there is no scientifically credible evidence that AZT has any benefits whatsoever. --John Lauritsen Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story
If the response to AZT among white AIDS activists was, in part, driven by hostility toward the research establishment, the reception of AZT among African Americans was affected by deep suspicions about the origins of AIDS and the extent to which the new therapies were viewed as an effort to inflict further injury. . . . Robert Scott, a gay African-American physician in Oakland, California, found it striking that while 40 percent of his HIV practice was not Black, every single patient who refused to take AZT was an African American. --Ronald Bayer and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, AIDS, Voices from the epidemic:An Oral History
In New York’s Washington Heights is a 4-story brick building called Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC). This former convent houses a revolving stable of children who’ve been removed from their own homes by the Agency for Child Services. These children are black, Hispanic and poor. Many of their mothers had a history of drug abuse and have died. Once taken into ICC, the children become subjects of [AIDS] drug trials sponsored by NIAID (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, a division of the NIH), NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in conjunction with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies – GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others.
The drugs being given to the children are toxic – they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage and fatal skin disorders. If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and have them force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines. -- Liam Scheff, The House That AIDS Built
Gallo sank into still deeper trouble in 1990 through a collaborative project with French scientist Daniel Zagury. . . Zagury, with the help of Gallo's lab, tested a supposed AIDS vaccine on nineteen human volunteers, some from Africa. Three of the patients died, a fact that Zagury left completely out of the published paper on the experiment. Word of the disaster and cover-up got out after an article appeared in the popular press by Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson. This in turn led to a major NIH investigation . . . .Gallo sensed his worsening plight. But as always, whenever he finds himself in a corner, mysterious events take place. A few weeks after the Zagury paper appeared in print, Gallo returned home one August evening from a big dinner to discover the aftermath of a burglary. . . . Gallo eagerly offered John Crewdson, the Chicago Tribune reporter, as his first suspect." --Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus
One of the potential side effects of Nevirapine, the experimental drug given to Joyce Hafford and babies in Africa.
It's way past time for the world, that's us, as well as the politicians and chronically misled talk-show hosts, to wake up to reality – the notion of a sexually-transmitted retrovirus causing an epidemic of immune deficiency in Africa is a racist construct. It has no basis in reality, and is causing a medical disaster in the call for the mass administration of "antiretrovirals" to the Third World – a form of iatrogenic genocide masquerading as philanthropy. --Rebecca Culshaw, What is PEM, and How Does It Concern HIV, AIDS and Africa?
If there was ever a prison that needed help, it was Limestone Correctional Facility. Even within the troubled Alabama penal system, this state compound near Huntsville was notorious for cruel punishment and medical neglect. In one drafty, rat-infested warehouse once reserved for chain gangs, the state quarantined its male prisoners with H.I.V. and AIDS, until the extraordinary death toll - 36 inmates from 1999 to 2002 - moved inmates to sue and the government to promise change. --Paul von Zielbauer, A Company's Troubled Answer for Prisoners With H.I.V., New York Times, August 1, 2005
Background on the AIDS Debate HHV-6 versus HIV Debate
AIDS versus Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Debate
Sites and Resources for Further Study The Debate about the Racial Politics of AIDS and CFS
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